Podcast Mic Direct: Services to Support the Creator Economy

I created a service and launched the website in three hours. This project is a culmination of a lot of online influences that have been screaming at me to create. The urge to try my hand at some no-code tools was building and then I saw a tweet from Nathan Baschez about a podcast mic rental and delivery service. 

Recently I’ve revamped my Twitter feed and it’s brought a wave of fresh information and ideas to me every day, Nathan’s tweet included. Twitter is a lot of things, but to me it’s a high-value feed of business and entrepreneurial content. I started taking my content diet seriously. It started with unfollowing most of my friends turned acquaintances (mostly people from high school) and following leaders in the startup, real estate, crypto, no-code, and marketing communities.

So on Friday January 8, 2021 when I saw the problem Nathan threw out to the world (which even included a potential solution) I knew I had to act. Right away the lightbulb went off and the solution felt simple to me. This was a chance to leverage #nocode tools that I’ve seen hyped up online and I thought, let’s give this a try.

First things first, run the idea by a friend (truth is this is a dangerous first step because sometimes people don’t see what you see or play devil’s advocate (side note – don’t play the devil’s advocate card – it is a real energy suck and doesn’t inspire creativity. I think in these early, early idea stages that kind of feedback is not helpful.. but that’s just me). I told my friend Kyle about the idea and he was supportive, told me to go for it. So I sat down at my computer and got to work.

I decided to make a simple website that offered the podcast mic service that was requested: https://podcastmicdirect.com.  I set up the site on Carrd. They offer “Simple, free, fully responsive one-page sites for pretty much anything.” I had never used Carrd before, but it really was as easy as they make it sound. I stated the value proposition up front and made  it the first thing a user sees when they arrive: we ship high-quality podcast mics.

I then looked through the replies to Nathan’s tweet for some inspiration. Someone commented on how the podcast legend Tim Ferris ships each of his guests an Audio-Technica mic so I went to Amazon and found the mic he ships out, copied the description of the features, and took a screenshot. All this info went onto my site to showcase the high quality equipment that we ship out. A reasonable question at this point is “Josh! You don’t have the mic to ship now. Isn’t that a problem?” This is a reasonable concern, but not one that I wanted to let stop me. If, and that’s a big if, someone actually orders a mic through my site, I will Amazon Prime the mic and accessories to my house and package them in a new box for the purchaser. Validate the idea before sinking capital into equipment!

Now that I had identified my equipment, I decided to break down the process on the site since that would be a frequent question that a potential customer would have and I wanted to address it right away. What I think is important to highlight about this is that while I don’t have a logistical pipeline built out now, it is something I can do if I had sales. To say that in different words, upon the time of publishing the site and sharing it with the world, I have no podcast mic to ship. No setup instructions created. And no sanitation supplies to make this process repeatable. But, these are all steps that I could complete quickly if an order was actually placed.

So I bet you’re wondering – how many orders did you get? 0.

Did I reach out to Nathan and tell him the service was available? Yep.

Didn’t he say he would be the first customer if someone made the service?! Indeed. You owe me an order, Nathan!

In the past, I may have never launched this website because of fear of not being prepared from the jump. But that would have required a magnitude of increased effort, time, resources. I would have had to buy the microphones, create setup instructions, and box up the product to prepare for shipping. Then once I shipped the product and received no orders, it would have made me hesitant to jump at the next idea that might be a hit. I didn’t advertise this service any more than a few tweets so the results aren’t surprising. I’ll keep the site live and see if the internet connects me to any lost souls looking for a podcast mic rental. Until then, onto the next project!

– Josh Gordon